‘Just a scratch’: harmless, but not necessarily trivial

It's Great But Not Necessarily About Attention

I point out that Mack and Rock manipulated both expectation and attention and suggest that their results ('inattentional blindness') may have been caused by lack of expectation rather than lack of attention. This alternative reading of Mack and Rock's results is supported by other findings, which suggest that 'pure' manipulations of expectation produce 'blindness' whereas 'pure' manipulations o...

Die—but not just yet

eterochromatin’s repressive hold on DNA transcription can only be relinquished when activators enter the nucleus. Or so the theory goes. But now Vanessa Witte, Andreas Baur (University of Erlangen, Germany), and colleagues find that a heterochromatin component can be pulled from the nucleus by both the HIV protein Nef and activated integrins. “This is a really new concept—that chromatin-associa...

Sledging in childhood: just harmless fun?

Perceptual similarity affects the learning curve (but not necessarily learning).

What role does item similarity play in motor skill acquisition? To examine this question, we used a modified version of the chord learning task (Seibel, 1963) that entails producing simultaneous finger key presses, similar to playing a chord on a piano. In Experiment 1, difficulty, as indexed by response time (RT) to a particular chord on the first session, was held constant, and chords that we...

Mathematically Structured but not Necessarily Functional Programming ( Extended Abstract )

Realizability is an interpretation of intuitionistic logic which subsumes the Curry-Howard interpretation of propositions as types, because it allows the realizers to use computational effects such as non-termination, store and exceptions. Therefore, we can use realizability as a framework for program development and extraction which allows any style of programming, not just the purely function...